The Supernatural Worldview by Cris Putnam

Author:Cris Putnam [Putnam, Cris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Defender Publishing
Published: 2014-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Satan, Demons, and the Ghost Hypothesis

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons.

—1 Timothy 4:1

One of my schools is the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, now known as BIOLA University, where I earned a certification in Christian apologetics.[395] A few years back, the BIOLA magazine ran a very interesting article called “Exorcizing Our Demons.” I was surprised to read that Dr. Daniel B. Wallace (1974, BIOLA)—one of the top New Testament scholars, Greek textbook authors, and professors at Dallas Theological Seminary—was asked to perform a house blessing/exorcism that became overtly supernatural. A wealthy Christian homeowner had reported poltergeist phenomena that began when his elderly father moved in, and he asked Wallace to bless the house. As Wallace and a colleague prayed through the rooms, objects began to move with no apparent cause. The BIOLA article reads:

“It was small objects, like magnets on the refrigerator flying clear across the room. It was really remarkable,” said Wallace, who once doubted that demonic activity occurs today. He’s now writing a book arguing that many evangelicals have become unbiblically antisupernatural.[396]

Wallace no longer doubts the Supernatural Worldview, and this impressed me, because it’s not often that a big name like Wallace (from a cessationist seminary like Dallas) will openly speak about such activity. I wrote Dr. Wallace, and he personally confirmed the above to be accurate, except for the part about the book, entitled Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit?, which was already written. Not only that, he also confirmed the overt poltergeist activity to me personally:

Cris, it has been awhile but I can say this regarding the items that flew in the house. There was an elderly gentleman living there who was dying. His son owned the home. It’s a very large home, and the father was upstairs in the “mother-in-law apartment.” Besides the father and son, the son’s wife and one baby lived in the house. No teenagers. Husband and wife in their 40s at the time. When the items flew, we were in the kitchen—about the farthest place from the mother-in-law apartment (which was on the third floor, I believe).[397]

I had him asked about teenagers and who else lived there because most parapsychologists try to explain poltergeist-type activity as psychokinesis from a living agent present in the haunted location. Usually a teenager is the culprit, and poltergeist activity is labeled RSPK (recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis), which sounds scientific but explains very little. However, because there were no typical RSPK agents present, this case excludes it and strongly supports the demonic hypothesis for this activity, as the objects were flying across the room in response to Wallace’s blessing the house. Thus, demons are immaterial beings who can affect the physical world, perhaps even reading and implanting ideas in our minds (Luke 8:27–29; Mark 9:22) and empowering false religions and some psychic phenomena. The demonic is all but dismissed under the delusion of scientism as per Carl

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